Behind The Depths of My Eyes
by FeverentMaim
Summary: -The years between the then and now become a matter of shadows, and their corruption of a soul - Caught in the rift of darkness and magic, the world of the Avatar discovers the universe beyond, guided by a transformed and psychologically mutilated Kuvira.


Behind The Depths of My Eyes

The years between the then and now become a matter of shadows, and their corruption of a soul.

...  
The first time, Kuvira nearly slept a sound dream.

She stood on a cragged peak, worn boulders jutting from all sides with veins of cracks and soddened moss. Her cheeks swelled around a blissful smile, gazing at how the towering alps submerged under fields of tall grass, green cascading with the wind as ripples danced into a vast valley. There, they met with a glittering stream, clear and blue as the sky that domed above.

Kuvira was barely aware of the presence in her vision. Caught by the corner, something tall and black; she thought someone awaited her quietly, but when she turned she saw instead a worn path, curved along the slope of the mount.

She followed curiously, an adventurous desire renewed by the enchanting landscape. The trail gently descended in switchbacks, ending suddenly at the bottom before a dark, cool cavern eroded deep into the mountainside.

The cavern was scarcely daunting, Kuvira having delved into many before. A light ready on her belt, she wandered within, quick to admire the sleeked amber that hung from the ceiling, with water dripping from their tips into carved ravines. The trickle sung sweetly in Kuvira's ear, beckoning her forward with a soothing melody.

Further and further she strayed into its depths, until she realized her journey unbecomingly odd. There was a whistle of compact gust, but not so much as a streak of breaking sunlight to show the cavern's end. Rather, the darkness had grown, her flashlight still bright yet shining on a cloak of black.

Unnerved, Kuvira decidedly turned to travel back to where she came. But the cavern stretched on, and Kuvira's light no longer shined on its wonders, nor reflected in drizzling water. She turned and turned and turned, realizing there was nothing before or behind, nothing but lifeless, barren space -

She awoke to a chill. Eyes blinked lazily at the maglev's yellow lamps, hydraulics humming dully on the other side of the haul as a mechsuit marched passed her compartment.

Soft footsteps prodded across the carpet. She assumed an exhausted Bataar had finally retired. Her head rose sluggishly from its cushion.

"Bataar?" she said groggily. "Have you finished..?"

She stilled. In the glow, she did not see a face, let alone Bataar's own.

A blackened figure stood in the corner, wrapped in frayed burlap, and whisps of fireless smoke festering along the creases. Her chest clutched. She thought of her plates, hand twitching to summon them from the pile crumpled on the floor. Chi dawdled through her arm, and even slower was it to reach the strips compacted on the sleeve of her suit. "Who are you?" she demanded.

At first, the thing did not speak. It moved languidly forward, the cloth billowing with the rolling smoke that served as its body. She strained her focus, forcing her chi to quicken.

"I am but a phantom's will." the figure said finally, the syllables falling weak as they escaped. One side of its garment lifted with a whisp of shadow, the smoke stretching out like an arm, a hand, and menacing, rawboned fingers armed with claws.

Then the shade lifted its head; a deep, bewitching blue shined alight beneath the robe.

Kuvira's plates charged, pointed knives striking the ghostly figure in hailing blitz. Smoke exploded around each wound. The burlap collapsed, disappearing as it fell with the smoke that filled it.

The tips of her plates were a rain of pinpoint vibrations through the car. Plated boots stampeded through her door, her acting lieutenant fervently alarmed.

"Are you alright, Lady Kuvira?!"

Her body was shaken, but she would let the guards see none of it. She nodded assuringly, a steady hand summoning her plates to readily return in quick procession. "I am fine. Go back to your posts."

The lieutenant hesitated warily. Kuvira imagined bewilderment behind his face guard, noting the flurry of pecked indents on the wall, and her posture, sitting upright with emboldened shoulders in her bed. He left still, without a single remark, his march an easy beat to her senses until he again stood watch.

She barely regained any flush of color. The chill lingered after the phantom's demise, heavy and unsettling, even when the true Bataar wandered into the sheets thereafter, unconsciously wrapped around his beloved as he slumbered.

Kuvira did not sleep, until she saw the sun wake upon the horizon.

...

Kuvira wandered to that precious valley in her waking hours. The solitude in sunlight. The liberated winds flying through the valley with white clouds on their spines like tidal waves.

She did not hear the thunderous force of judge's mallet. The cacophony of two sides. Cries of elation. Shouts of repudiation.

At night she would sleep, and dream of nothing.

...

The second, a draft swiftly came in the night.

It chilled the mildew-infested air of the earth-ward, daggers striking throats hoarse and limbs numb with an icey sting. Inmates griped in the distant cells, Kuvira hearing them solely through the echoes that traveled the ventilation tunnels.

She had naught her sight to rely upon, though in the vast penumbra she had smelled the must fade, the reign of silence abduct the voices of her neighbors. Her body filled with ice, the thin sheets of her cot never any means of warmth.

"Alas, here you are immured..." a voice murmured wistfully. The sound was so soft, Kuvira believed it a desperate figment, willing to make the seamless shadows vaguely tangible.

Until goosebumps trailed along her body, unraveling a dread that began to cling to her heart and mind like a leech. The woodboards creaked a lasting ache. A gasp that was not her own wallowed in the dark.

And as if behind an obsidian curtain, the phantom's eye awakened, an unearthly glow among the pitch.

She swallowed her shock, resisting to crawl her back against the wall. Her tongue stuttered, not simply of the cold, the power of her tone forced out by pure tenacity. "What do you want?"

An oblique diamond - the pupil splitting the iris - swelled avidly to life, and with the same unsettling earnest, veered gingerly ever so closer. "So now, since you have nothing to fight, you would be willing to plead." The phantom said curiously.

Shriveled flesh of a hand met her cheeks. Nails grazed her skin to cusp around her jaw. She quickly tore away from its grip, feeble though horrid to the touch.

The phantom heaved a crestfallen sigh, the sound bellowing like the burdened croon of a dying man. "It isn't my desire, but yours I come to fulfill." It said calmly, as Kuvira had grabbed at the walls to lift herself from her cot, her shoulders squared, steeling against belligerent spasms. The eye met at her height, mere inches from her own, her face illuminated with its intense incandescence. "And for my gift, I shall ask from you a small price."

Kuvira stared into the eye, suspense and hypothermia threatening to enrapture her in paralysis. The phantom gazed patiently in return, the saturated color almost alluring by its dark hatches, and sparks of lightning gold. She wondered if the creature sought a reply, or was even concerned with what laid in her visage.

Nevertheless, Kuvira did not respond. She simply raised her head in a show of composure, her steadfast expression unyielding.

Grave laughter bursted, cawing choked wheezes filled with an abject mirth. The phantom's frigid and awful breath finally ceased clouding her skin, though its eye kept trained astutely on Kuvira, not once glancing astray. Its voice slithered with haunting glee, conceiving the faceless thing had flourished a ghoulish smile. "I am impressed by your strength of will, my lady." It said in hushed pleasure.

The eye then turned away, and vanished. For a time, the darkness fell quiet, a veneer like a cold house of myriad shrouds; a silent monster veiled in solace. Kuvira waited, enduring the wrenched chill, listening to herself breathe.

Suddenly, just as Kuvira believed herself alone it spoke, wan in the somber distance, but clear as though it whispered into her ear.

"I shall give you time to think...Until I return again."

...

The closest shore was miles from sight. Flyfish, and the moon at night, were the only company Kuvira was to expect on a ship that doubled as a drifting prison.

It was the first of daylight she had seen in months, passing white clouds and snowcapped mountains aboard a Repulic dirigible. How pallid her skin had become nearly frightened her, blood that coursed rhythmically visible through opaque wrists.

The ramp opened out onto the deck, and lo the Avatar herself at the bottom, watching Chief Beifong and her metalbenders escort Kuvira off the dirigible in chains. Kuvira was unsure why she had come; were she in Korra's place, she would have been elsewhere.

But as she saw the chief nod to Korra, and she reversely the same, she knew their meeting had been arranged. Beifong marched to the bridge, where a white-bearded man in a captain's visor stood expectantly at the helm. Kuvira watched absently at her back, unaware the metalbenders had fallen behind their charge.

Korra, she did not ignore, markedly branded by the color of her attire.

Kuvira's gaze turned askance as The Avatar neared. A great deal of good-will conveyed in the curve of her slight smile, and comfort set pleasantly on supple cheeks. Such was her amicable beam in contrast to the rest of her, right and tall with severe prerogative. "Avatar." Kuvira greeted lukewarmly.

Korra's brow wrinkled, folding over the bridge of her nose. "There's no need for you to call me 'Avatar', you know."

A smile of Kuvira's own could not be suppressed, be it though flawed by pensiveness. Korra side-stepped into her full view, trying carefully, Kuvira realized, to encourage eye-contact. Discomfitted by the gentleness she bared, Kuvira refused to give her anything near the sort. "I wanted to see how you were, after our last talk."

At first, Kuvira wanted to nod, and open her mouth to utter three little words of assurance. They did not come out - for if anything, they would have been a lie.

"I do wish to ask you something, Korra."

Eyelids lifted in surprise, drawn up to show wide, bright circles. "About what?"

"The spirits." Kuvira said, so fresh in her memory, the eye a vivid and anxious omen. Shivers rapidly ran above and below her spine, making her cold despite the warm mist from the sea. "I tore apart their vines." She blinked, speaking in almost a dead monotone. "I can imagine they're quite angry."

Surprise riddled away Korra's smile. Incipiently, she was baffled, unsure what to make of the outlandish request. But when she replied, quieted, a sense of unease had dawned on her. "I would not know if they all are, but -" There was a fleeting quiver of dismay. "- Why? Have you been seeing them?"

Kuvira did not act ostensibly. She remained reasonably tranquil, nerves suppressed under a small, exasperated look. "I was simply curious." She said thinly.

Shinking of polished steel cut into ear shot, and the women turned to Beifong's armor glinting in the sun as she walked, the captain keeping at her side with a thick sheaf of papers signed in scribbled hanzi. They both halted halfway, Beifong eyeing Korra with her arms impatiently folded over her chest. Lips rolled into a tense line, as Korra drew an unquestionably dire countenance. "Kuvira..." she started concernedly. "IS there something wrong?"

Passed Beifong and the disgruntled captain, and the quarterdeck of the ship, there was the sky and the ocean, meeting as one on the hazed horizon. Kuvira focused upon it, staring into its azure nihility as she did the phantom's that terrible night.

She could not tell the truth, either. The truth, even to herself, was too unbelievable.

After a waning pause, Kuvira finally looked to Korra determinedly, tired glaze somewhat fading from her eyes. "I am fine, Avatar." She stated, firmly enough that she hoped the Avatar believed every word.  
...

The third, the moon fully lit the sky, reflected brilliantly in the sea.

Mild rays cut through the bars of her window, revealing again the phantom's being in the light. It was no less fearful a sight. Kuvira's heart would have been racing were it not for the chilling spell, which instead made it rigid, stagnate. This time, however, she stood aside the window, able to urge away the tremble in her legs and arms. The look of a dauntless ego wore precise in her eyes.

The phantom seemed confounded by Kuvira's stance. It browsed her head to toe, reading her poise as its head hovered high with detached interest.

An aspect of its attention then changed minutely, and a low chortle croaked from the depths of its form. It was ghastly amused.

"A warrior 'till the last. How quaint." chided the phantom mockingly. Smoke rushed across the floor at Kuvira's feet, composing a web of ice that gradually masked the pristine bamboo. "Though I should hope this is hardly a sign of your accordance."

Kuvira regarded the phantom anticipantly. The air stung her nose as she inhaled a soothing breath, trying to kill any trepidation that may have expelled from her throat. She supposed her intruder expected no more than a mute facade, the eye dilating explosively when she exclaimed. "You did not say that I must."

Excitement grew in the pace of its speech, and the loudness of its deadened husk. Though it controlled itself all too well, gliding lightly towards Kuvira, nearly inaudible taps touching step-by-step on the floor."Oh, but it is indeed a choice." It retorted with cunning. "You want only to be great, yet you have not gained."

Kuvira immediately looked to the phantom astounded, and in a short row of contemplation, understood its bid all at once; power for the longing, the refuse and those fallen into misery.

But hers was not misery. Hers was no longer as the urchin in the streets, or a distant desire. Three years through, she discarded the woes of life for the maddening thrill of conquest and domination; what she thought foolishly a solid vision took only a weapon of her own conception to reveal a frailty of illusion.

For what kind of gift could replace that which she lost willfully - truly, it would not be enough to fill the void.

She fell away from beckoning mire, downcast. "And I know I cannot have it." She responded softly, glancing it nevermore valiant but anguished. Languidly, she turned to view the moon and the endless plane of white stars, the scent of salt water passing her nose with the spray that soared over the ship's teetering haul. Some of its froth almost reached to her cell.

"Say to me what you want, spirit. I refuse."

The ice had climbed and reached into the ceiling. Icicles began to trail down from the rafters, a few viciously pointed above Kuvira's head. She leaned against the sill in silence, her limbs acquitting to the senselessness of algor, herself and the ship rising and falling limply over the waves.

"Very well." the phantom hissed smoothly, and it was all the warning it gave.

One ear rang deaf as a massive blow collided her head with the wall. Kuvira held her hand up in stunning pain, realizing only after the phantom's frozen claws had seized her neck that she could not breathe. She grasped at its hand. Kicked its discarnate corpse. Her sight first tunneled, then blurred, the hellish blaze in its eye the last thing she would see clearly, before the entire room mixed like running inkblots.

The assault was forgotten, when darkness was left, and came alive as dreams of horror, drenched in savage violet.

...

The world over riveted in the search for Kuvira. Headlines exploded with bold, black titles. Teams from every nation scoured land, sea, and sky, cheifly among them Lin Beifong and her elite metalbending force.

But days became weeks, and nothing was seen or heard of Kuvira. Not even a body.

Cheif Lin was the last to forfeit, and returned to Republic City to find Korra awaiting with Asami at the station, worriment strewn behind a glass mask of solemnity. Lin had no news to bring, but a lustrous titanium plate, shaped like a knife.


End file.
